We first covered this in our safety tips for thawing a turkey, but there really is no benefit to washing your chicken. Here are a couple of easy to use tips to help you get the best out of your chicken. The good news is that there are a couple of ways you can cook chicken safely without compromising on its flavor or texture. Overall, a misunderstanding of why chicken needs to be brought up to temperature, a reliance on outdated ways of assessing the “doneness” of the meat, and overblown fears about the color of the meat have led to people overcompensating and overcooking their chicken into a dry, tasteless mess. If your thermometer reads 165☏ (170-175☏ for dark meat), then a slight blush to the meat doesn’t indicate that it’s unsafe. This can result in a pH level, which can turn the meat a little pink.Īgain, this is nothing to be worried about. The chicken’s PH levelĭepending on the type of chicken and the method used to store it, the meat you’re eating might be a little less acidic than other birds. If the liquid you are seeing is thin, pinkish, and not obviously clotted, it’s probably just perfectly safe myoglobin. When a packaged chicken has sat for a while on a supermarket shelf, myoglobin can pool in the lower extremities and can be mistaken for blood. Myoglobin is used to deliver oxygen to the muscles and is the reason that the more heavily used leg muscles of the chicken are a darker color. The reality is that, unless something has gone drastically wrong in the cooking process, that red liquid is probably a pigmented protein called myoglobin. With chicken, the presence of what looks like blood is often more concerning. With beef, this liquid is often discounted as beef can be safe to eat at a variety of temperatures. The presence of a red liquid in cooked meat is often misinterpreted as blood. This is particularly common with frozen chickens as the freezing process causes the marrow to expand. One of the reasons you might see some pink or purplish color in the meat is that the bone marrow of these chickens, which is naturally a purple color, can seep through the still porous bones of these young chickens. Most chicken that you buy from your local supermarket comes from pullets, which are chicken less than a year old. If your preferred cooking method is grilling, we also have a whole blog post explaining appropriate grilling times for chicken. Pasteurization of meat is a function of temperature and time and occurs on a microscopic level, so your eyes are not the right tool for this job.Īdditionally, there are plenty of reasons why chicken meat, and its juices, might be a little pink and still be perfectly safe to eat. The internal temperature of the chicken, not the color of the meat or the clarity of the juices, is what you set your standard by. If you want to know if your chicken is properly cooked, get yourself a reliable instant-read meat thermometer. So, ditch your visual checks and old wives’ tales, there is only one accurate method to know if your chicken is cooked correctly. Many people incorrectly assume that even the slightest blush in chicken meat means it is undercooked and dangerous. The key fact to take away from this is that the chicken internal temperature, not the look of the chicken, is the most important factor. It is also recommended that dark meat should be brought up to 170-175☏ because of the higher amount of connective tissue and the greater density of the more actively worked leg muscles. The reason that the FDA recommends that you bring your chicken internal temperature up to 165☏ is that this results in a 7-log10 reduction or the reduction in the number of living microorganisms by 10000000-fold.Īt this temperature, even the most stubborn strain of Salmonella will be killed off. To avoid the risk of food poisoning, the FDA recommends that all poultry be cooked to a minimum internal of 165☏. These symptoms are bad enough for a healthy adult, but they can be dangerous to the very young, old, and already infirm. The CDC estimates that around one million Americans every year get sick from exposure to these bacteria through contact with raw or improperly cooked poultry.Įach of these bacteria can cause food poisoning, which can result in high fever, vomiting, dehydration, and diarrhea. coli, Clostridium perfringens, and the slightly more infamous Salmonella. What are the risks of eating undercooked chicken?Īs we mentioned, raw poultry can harbor a number of nasty bacteria, including Campylobacter, E.
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